LEGER: In war on fear, missing billions a mere rounding error

HMCS Toronto recently seized a cargo of heroin, shown in a handout photo, from a boat in the Indian Ocean. It’s bizarre to claim every drug bust is a blow to international terrorism. (MALCOLM BYERS / DND / CP)

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It should be no surprise that the federal government can’t account for $3.1 billion in national-security spending. When you are splurging public fear money, as Canada has been since 2001, what’s a few billion?

I’m not the only Canadian concerned about the track we’re on when it comes to security spending in our democracy, where we’ve been overwhelmed by the mythology of threat. Questioning where the money goes is akin to treason. No wonder it goes astray.

Auditor General Michael Ferguson reported that the elusive $3.1 billion in anti-terrorism spending had not been properly recorded in the federal accounts. So while the money isn’t necessarily stolen or lost, none of the grown-ups in charge know where it went.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper suggested there was little to worry about, since the money is around somewhere. “There are no red flags,” he told the Commons.

The PM might not see anything to worry about, but there are red flags aplenty about that $3.1 billion and the billions more we are spending on the care and feeding of national fears. The bills are immense and as this episode illustrates, they’re coming in with too few controls and too little accountability.

A 2012 study by the Rideau Institute estimated that since late 2001, Canada has spent $92 billion more on its national security establishment than it would have without the terror menace. That spending went to the Armed Forces, intelligence services, police agencies and to border security measures. Remember, that’s incremental spending in addition to the billions Canada normally would have spent on those services.

National security spending is running at more than $35 billion a year, about 12 per cent of the federal budget. I won’t bore you with a list of other priorities on which that money could be better spent. But I do question whether we need to devote 12 per cent of federal spending toward providing a false sense of public security about the bad guys at our gates.

And that’s just the government. The total doesn’t include billions more spent by airlines, ports, transport authorities and businesses to comply with legislation set up, supposedly, to combat terrorism. Anyone who has flown lately will know how elaborate the security measures have become and the toll they’ve taken on personal privacy.

Yet there’s only been one documented case — in Israel — of an attack being prevented by all those labour-intensive airport measures. Is the money well spent?

Here’s another example. Last week, the frigate HMCS Toronto intercepted a boat in the Indian Ocean and confiscated 315 kilograms of heroin. This was lauded as a great feat, with the usual unsupported claims of another win in the “war on terror.”

Problem is, nobody can prove that a boatload of dope in that part of the world has anything to do with terrorism. Yes, smugglers and terrorists have been linked in some cases. But it’s bizarre to claim every drug bust as a blow to international terrorism.

HMCS Toronto is in the Arabian Sea region to provide “maritime security and counter-terrorism,” according to the Canadian Forces. The navy has been in the region since 2004; so almost nine years of expensive ship time, patrolling an area where no hostile navy has a presence.

This isn’t like the army in Afghanistan, battling the fearsome Taliban. This is a navy operating in seas where, with few exceptions, the only other ships are either friendly or mercantile.

Somehow, we’ve come to accept these distortions as a fact of life, despite the evidence to the contrary. The most recent eruptions, the Boston Marathon bombing and the Via Rail conspiracy, didn’t come from faraway seas. They came from within.

Maybe that’s why Public Security Minister Vic Toews has announced another $1.7 million for anti-terrorism research. When you’re scared of bad guys, the sky’s the limit.